Mobile First SEO Tricks & Tips

HARTENSTINE Search Engine First Marketing We’ll assume you know that SEO in 2017 is now exclusively mobile oriented. You won’t be talking about desktop optimization anymore because Google isn’t going to be talking about desktop SEO anymore. Its all about mobile for the rest of your life.

So we have a quick trick to test if your website needs help, below.

So what does the average business owner need to know about their website and mobile first search optimization?

(Remember years ago when they said you didn’t need to do SEO because Google does not want you to optimize your website?) Today Google writes an awful lot about optimizing your website – for mobile devices and therefore mobile search. Never say never!

Mobile devices have different sizes of screens and not fast and unlimited bandwidth. So optimization is about your website looking good on any device and loading quickly. That’s it!

Now for the techie it means reading about https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving

Again these things are not super complex, there are just so many of these little things to consider that its a full time job, and that means a business owner has to hire someone to do the job for them. ( BTW the days of DIY SEO are over too ) In order to hire someone, you would like to know what they are supposed to do – exactly. You could start here – in fact it is ALL right there.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/

Now if your website is older – or even if it isn’t and has a responsive design, you want to know if its going to please Googlebot. Here is our trick as promised. Does your site have a “Vary Header” function call? Here is what the code looks like in WordPress (functions.php).

function add_vary_header($headers) {
$headers[‘Vary’] = ‘User-Agent’;
return $headers;
}
add_filter(‘wp_headers’, ‘add_vary_header’);

This communicates with the browser about the size of the screen. This is just a test you can do today that is current for early 2018.

You can go here and test your website for other design weaknesses and search engines “unfriendliness”.

https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

2 thoughts on “Mobile First SEO Tricks & Tips”

  1. That was great tip. I looked into it and found our website was not mobile freindly and did not have the Vary Header code. Our website provider didn’t know anything aboutthe Vary Header and said it doesn’t matter because the website is responsive. Thanks. Now I know.

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